The Tyranny of the Soundtrack: A Modest Proposal for a World Without Music

I've tuned out. I skipped Treefort the past two years. I can't take it anymore. I have begun to suspect that music is not a universal language, but rather a highly efficient delivery system for discomfort and violence.

At first, it was a mild irritation after hearing too many coffeeshop playlists with lightly jazzy lo-fi beats and inoffensive soft register vocals. And I had a breakdown the other day when I realized my grocery store was serving up a BØRNS song to make me feel good about paying through the nose for organic cucumbers.

Something in me is hardening with all this incidental music.

I hear it too well. It enters without permission. It bypasses reason. It does not ask to be interpreted. It occupies like an invasive force. And once inside, it lingers with a peculiar violence, repeating itself long after its source has vanished. A trespasser who refuses to leave.

Pascal Quignard, in his quietly ferocious meditation on the subject, suggests that music is the only art that invades the body directly. You can close your eyes to a painting. You can put down a book. But sound penetrates. It crosses thresholds unannounced. It is inhaled. It is endured.

This is not a benign act.

We are told that music soothes. That it heals. That it brings people together. And yet, history offers a more complicated account. Music has accompanied war, ritual, coercion. It has been used to unify, but also to discipline. To regulate bodies. To synchronize movement. To erase silence, which is perhaps the last remaining territory of the self.

There is something deeply suspect about an art form that functions equally well as lullaby and accompaniment to a military command.

I've come to realize my condition is known as musical anhedonia, the inability to derive pleasure from music. It is often described clinically, as though it were a deficit. A missing receptor. A failure of wiring.

But what if it is not a deficiency, but a kind of resistance?

Consider the ubiquity of music in modern life. It is no longer encountered; it is imposed. It fills elevators, waiting rooms, rideshares, sidewalks. It leaks from headphones, from storefronts, from passing cars. It colonizes public and private space with equal indifference.

Silence, once abundant, is now rationed.

And so I have begun to experience music not as art, but as social pressure. A constant insistence to feel some emotion on demand, pre-selected and delivered through chord progression.

There is, I think, a subtle tyranny in this. Music does not merely accompany life; it edits it. It tells us what a moment should mean. A swelling string section informs us that something is profound. A minor key suggests tragedy. A beat drop insists upon excitement.

But what if the moment resists interpretation? What if it is flat, ambiguous, unresolved?

Music will not allow this. It insists, bluntly. Idiotically.

If music is invasive and bypasses consent… if it is used, historically and presently, to regulate bodies and emotions… then perhaps we have been too lenient in our treatment of it.

Perhaps we have mistaken ubiquity for necessity.

We might begin by introducing modest restrictions. Nothing draconian at first. Designated “silent zones” in public spaces. Mandatory disclosure before playing music in shared environments. A simple warning: This establishment contains music.

From there, we could explore licensing requirements. Not for musicians, but for listeners. Why should one person’s playlist be another person’s neurological occupation? A permit system, perhaps. Tiered access. Those wishing to broadcast music in public would need to demonstrate not only competence in taste, but also demonstrated discernment in volume, duration, and contextual appropriateness.

We might imagine a world in which music is no longer ambient, but intentional. A world in which it is sought out rather than escaped from. In which silence is restored to its rightful place.

Of course, there would be resistance. There always is when a dominant system is questioned. People would claim that life without constant music is unimaginable. That it would be empty. That it would be, in some vague but urgent sense, less human.

Beneath the layers of curated sound, there is something quieter and more honest.

If music cannot be controlled at the level of environment, then perhaps it must be addressed at the level of the human. Specifically: the human capacity to receive it.

I propose a voluntary program of auditory refinement. A subtle recalibration of the ear. Not deafness. Nothing so crude or irreversible. Rather, a gentle dampening of the frequencies most commonly associated with melodic and harmonic pleasure. The particular intervals that produce what we have come to call “enjoyment.”

Participants in this program would retain full auditory function. They would hear speech, traffic, wind through trees. They would remain, in every practical sense, engaged with the world. But music would lose its hold. It would register merely as patterned sound. Neutral. Uninsistent. Ignorable. I can imagine the immediate benefits.

No more involuntary earworms. No more emotional manipulation via chord progression. No more sudden hijacking of one’s internal state by a chorus remembered against one’s will. The psyche, once so easily commandeered, would regain its sovereignty.

Critics would call it extreme. They would say it robs life of beauty. That it flattens experience. That it severs us from some essential, ineffable dimension of being.

But is it truly beautiful if it cannot be refused?

The quiet, the unstructured, the unsignaled moment that does not arrive with a soundtrack to tell you what it means. The uncomposed life, which must be felt without orchestration.

It is possible that in removing music’s dominance, we might rediscover a more difficult, but more authentic, form of attention.

A life without cues. A feeling without accompaniment.

Naturally, participation would be elective. No one would be compelled to undergo such a refinement. Those who cherish music would remain untouched, free to immerse themselves as deeply as they wish.

But for those of us who are overstimulated and sonically fatigued, it would offer an alternative. A way out.

And if, over time, more and more people found themselves drawn to the clarity of a de-musicalized existence, well, any broader cultural shifts that followed would be entirely incidental.

A world completely devoid of music is a world at peace with itself.

This is A. Fools Production